board go and does it help the Ryzen CPUs or does it hold them back ? An unusual question to ask of a motherboard , but given that we only recently gained access to advanced memory tuning options , the auto rules for this motherboard literally determine how good it is against the competition for the most part and most people . Add to which , how memory timings arte labelled and how they work on AMD ’ s platform isn ’ t identical to what we ’ ve experienced with INTEL chipsets .
Superficially it ’ s not going to be easy to find any fault with the K7 , it has all the bells and whistles that modern high end boards come with including U . 2 and M . 2 connectivity . Those are par for the course these days and aren ’ t what make motherboards great or not . The only thing left that distinguishes motherboards from each other is performance and the Gaming K7 is an interesting product when dealing purely with performance . The only way you can appreciate this difference is against another competing product , like the Gaming 5 or even CROSSHAIR VI Hero .
Whatever your present opinion of the K7 , you should know that the K7 as represented here is the worst case scenario as things are going to continue to improve . Your chosen Ryzen CPU will only get better and that ’ s exactly what we want and need . So we will revisit this review in future when Threadripper is out perhaps and there have been some more updates .
So just in case you ’ re not aware of the GAMING 5 , there ’ s no point in me telling you the K7 is similar to it or identical . So , let ’ s run through the obvious abilities and features of this motherboard . First and foremost , this is a gaming motherboard , whatever that has come to mean . It does mandate that there ’ s a dedicated LAN controller , which can prioritize gaming traffic over any other forms of internet traffic on your system . Be it it ’ s done in software or hardware is immaterial . The K7 does this via the Rivet Networks Killer Ethernet 2500 which is complemented by the Intel GbE controller . Of course teaming
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